Podium: What Shapes a Sporting Champion?

By Ben Oakley

What does it really take to make the podium? Which of the biological, environmental and psychological factors really shape a champion's route to the top?

To answer these questions, Ben Oakley has taken the original step of combining existing research with a study of leading athletes' autobiographies. Looking at the early histories and initial challenges of serial champions in their own words, Podium sheds new light on their commonalities.

A similar focus in training, similar influences around them and, above all, similar mental attributes are revealed – and tales of individual brilliance are given a fresh twist. From Ian Thorpe, Usain Bolt and Chrissie Wellington to Victoria Pendleton, Lionel Messi and Roger Federer, all we see is a smooth progression to glory, but each is a rocky path punctuated by critical episodes, and it is the response to these events that can transform talented people into winners.

Podium is fascinating reading for anyone interested in the big names at the peak of their respective sports, and essential for coaches or parents of the next budding star. This enthralling read will enrich your interpretation of champions' lives and provide a map of the complex paths through sport to the podium.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781472902177

Ben Oakley

Ben Oakley is Head of Childhood, Youth and Sport at the Open University. He was a world champion competitor and then a coach at two Olympic games for the sport of windsurfing. Ben was also an academic consultant to the BBC during and in the build-up to the Olympics, including writing for the BBC Sport website.

Book preview

Part I

Explaining the path to the top

The London 2012 Olympic final of the women’s judo. In the audience, British Prime Minister David Cameron and visiting Russian Premier Vladimir Putin, the latter a huge judoka fan – this event has been carefully chosen.

In the wider audience, millions of avid viewers across the world, keen to see an eagerly awaited contest which has captured the public imagination and will lead to a virtual standing ovation on Twitter as one of the most popular online replay moments of the 2012 Olympics. On the bright yellow mat, two young women are going for gold. Two young women at the height of their powers who are the best in the world at what they are about to do. But only one of them can win. One is from Ohio, USA. The other – just to add a bit more spice – is a local London girl. To hot it up even further, the USA have never in the history of the Olympic Games won a gold at judo, and Putin knows this!

The London girl, Gemma Gibbons from down the road in Greenwich, had spent part of the day having her hand heavily strapped. ‘It hurt a lot,’ she confessed after the contest, ‘but I was told I was fine and encouraged to get on with it. I’m grateful they didn’t tell me otherwise – I’d have been worrying about it’.¹ As she suspected, the medical team had decided not to give her all the facts. She later revealed, ‘They knew it was broken but decided it wouldn’t get any worse.’ It must have been the toughest of calls for the medical team. It took her four months to get over the injury.

Few people watching that epic final would have realised that Gemma was fortunate to have made the British team. Earlier in the year, she lost out on selection in her favoured under-70 kilos weight category. She had to adjust her training to gain weight, enabling her to compete in the heavier under-78 kilos category.

In her semi-final earlier that day, she had endured five minutes of stalemate before the contest went into a nail-biting golden score situation in which the first score determined the winner. Summoning all her strength, power and skill, she spectacularly threw the French world champion to secure her place in the final. An emotional Gibbons held her hands to her face as she knelt, then slowly stood up, looked upward and mouthed the words, ‘I love you, Mum’.

Eight years earlier, Gemma had lost her mother, Jeanette, to leukaemia. It was Jeanette who had introduced Gemma to judo. That moving moment touched millions as it was replayed frequently as one of the iconic images of 2012. The backstory of Gemma Gibbons was coming to the front of the action.

In the final she faced American, Kayla Harrison. Twenty-two-year-old Kayla’s backstory was not so much touching as downright shocking. Her long and sometimes tortuous path to this final had been poisoned by the sexual abuse of her former coach, Daniel Doyle, which started when she was just 13. She recalled in retrospect, ‘I mean, it was definitely grooming … I moved to the club when I was eight years old. From a young age, I had a very keen drive to please people.’²

A Time magazine interview revealed that her mother finally discovered the abuse through one of Kayla’s friends and reported Doyle. In 2007, the former coach pleaded guilty to ‘engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place’. Some of the abuse took place while they were abroad for judo tournaments. He is serving a 10-year prison sentence.

Kayla moved to Massachusetts to join a new father-and-son coaching team, the Pedros. According to Jimmy Pedro Junior, the traumatised 16-year-old ‘was somebody who had no self-esteem … She was somebody who didn’t know if she wanted to go on with life or not’. His assessment signalled the difficult journey ahead. ‘I hated judo,’ confessed Kayla. ‘I hated the Pedros. I didn’t want to be the strong girl. I didn’t want to be the golden girl, I didn’t want to be the one who overcame everything.’

Eventually, the Pedros’ coaching, together with the support of her judoka peers, helped her on her path to elite success. That is why she publicly acknowledged that she owed any success she had to the Pedros and her teammates.

As she progressed through the rounds in London towards the final, she drew constantly on an inner hunger to succeed and a well-developed, tough mind. She repeated her own mantra. ‘This is my day, this is my purpose.’

In front of a packed and loudly partisan home crowd, Harrison beat Gibbons in the final. America had its first gold in the sport. The lives of the two young women would never be the same again.

What was it Muhammed Ali said? ‘The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.’³

It’s not just their passion for combat at the highest level that Harrison and Gibbons shared with the legendary World Heavyweight Champion. It’s also their ability to overcome challenges and work single-mindedly towards their dream. Their determination, persistence and years of training had got them to this point, something the watching millions would have little concept of.

They also shared other similarities. Their respective mothers’ influence since Jeannie, Kayla’s mother, had – like Gemma’s mother Jeanette – introduced her to the sport. Kayla’s and Gemma’s coaches also played similar functions as motivational role models. The British coach Kate Howey won her first Olympic medal (a bronze) as a competitor at the Barcelona Olympics, which inspired Gemma and many other youngsters in the UK. A year earlier, in the same Barcelona venue – the Palau Blaugrana – the US coach Jimmy Pedro also became a judo legend in the USA with a bronze at the World Championships.

Not all champions share so many coincidences, but there are some patterns in each sport – and individual attributes from childhood and beyond – that shape champions’ paths.

It is how developing champions deal with these hidden, complex and unspeakably tough paths to the top, which are driven by complex motivations and punctuated by critical events that is the focus of this book.

Paths to the top

All too often we focus on polarised and oversimplified explanations of champions’ success. In judo, for instance, a focus on genetic and physical attributes would put Gemma and Kayla’s success down to their supreme agility, power and speed. At its most extreme, single genetic characteristics are used to explain success, so that Ian Thorpe’s flipper-sized feet have been claimed to be the secret of his success in swimming. It suggests some champions are freaks of nature without recognising that physical attributes are not down to one gene, and need to be honed and combined with the right mindset.

More recently the quality and quantity of practice (in particular 10,000 hours) has been the focus of simplified explanations of success.⁴ We now know this not to be the case, but this approach lays success at the door of the athlete’s learning environment. It claims that the learning of detailed movement patterns and the ability to sustain quality practices account for Gemma and Kayla’s success. For instance, if we examined how they trained, and were able to track their progress from an early age to look at how they were encouraged to persevere we might be able to provide a plausible explanation of how their agility, power, speed and above all champion judo technique, was learned.

This kind of naive oversimplification has been used to suggest that successful graduates from tennis or golf academies are not naturals but more freaks of extreme nurture.

The familiar compromise, of course, is to say it’s a mixture of both natural characteristics and the learning environment. But, for me, that is not enough. I want a deeper understanding. Champions’ paths are punctuated with a variety of potential roadblocks and a complex interaction between a range of physical, social and mental factors (including motivational influences) that keep athletes going. In my quest to explain this complexity I draw on some of my own experiences as a former Olympic coach at the Seoul and Barcelona Games and as an academic.

But, as Muhammed Ali urges, we need to delve deep behind the lines. In looking beneath the surface for what shapes champions, I wanted to view whole careers, not just the snapshot that is represented by Gemma and Kayla in their early to mid-twenties.

Champions’ paths by numbers

Initially I was probably subconsciously influenced by the Moneyball⁵ phenomenon in looking for neat representation of sporting careers by numbers. I experimented by graphically representing the career progress of tennis player Andre Agassi and athlete Kelly Holmes to see what their paths looked like. For Agassi we have his Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) world ranking history and for Holmes her annual personal bests (PBs) in the 800m discipline to use as data. My experimental mapping of their progress paths are shown in Figures 1.1 and 1.2.

What does this tell us? First, each path is distinct and different in shape. Second, neither path is a smooth linear line of gradual progress to the ultimate goal of world number one or Olympic gold. Both paths are zigzags full of steep progress with plateaux and deep downward ravines. It is all too easy to let the path metaphors tumble out – ‘the path to Everest is long’, ‘… negotiating foothills before the summit’ and referring to coaches as ‘guides’ and so on.

I was intrigued. What explained Agassi’s fall from number 1 down to 141 and his climb back again? Why did Holmes’s career stutter early on? I went to their autobiographies in search of answers (of course, being aware of potential autobiographical bias).

Describing the detailed ups and downs of individual champions is most definitely not the focus of this book. But I’ll answer the above questions.

I learnt that both had slightly fractured childhoods, though I was not yet able to interpret the impact of this. But in their career paths I began to see that it was how Agassi and Holmes responded to key negative episodes in sport and in life, and the ways in which their desire and need to compete was reignited that made the big difference. Now I needed a broader sample from which I might pick narrative examples to illustrate the issues addressed in this book.

Figure 1.1 Kelly Holmes, career performance over time.

Figure 1.2 Andre Agassi, career performance over time.

Agassi’s fall and rise⁶

His plummeting rankings had little to do with tennis strategy or physical condition, but rather life events disturbing his contentment and mental state. A failing marriage to Brooke Shields, the distractions of injury, illness in close friends’ families and his general disillusionment with tennis. A symptom of his state of mind was his taking crystal meth. This was not someone who was struggling with prolonged injuries, or match strategy, or having a crisis with his service action; the bad results were caused by Agassi’s inability to find the motivation and focus required for top-level competition. Or rather, it was his inability to have a fruitful life away from tennis – to mentally separate tennis and the rest of his problems – that caused him to lose interest and drive.

The two-year journey back to the top was again largely mental. Perhaps his description of an inspirational meeting with Nelson Mandela ignited an altruistic spark, and suddenly his tennis motivation was reinvigorated from his desire to generate income for the charter school he was developing. It was a tad ironic that someone who had voluntarily ducked out of school at an early age for the sake of tennis was now pursuing the dream of providing education for others.

He also moved on from his divorce to pursue Steffi Graff. Agassi’s tennis trademarks – the ability to hit fizzing backhands up the line and return a serve better than anyone else in the world – never went away. What did desert him for a period was motivation, concentration, clear goals and world-class fitness. During Agassi’s various crises his problems were hidden to the outside observer, locked away in his mind.

Holmes’ stuttering start⁷

If you were looking at the early career of Kelly Holmes from the age of 16 to her early 20s from a physiological perspective you would expect a more or less straight line to reflect her response to increased training. That didn’t happen. The influence of significant others, life events, career aspiration and athletics passion all came to the fore and mingled in different ways over time. It was during her early years as a mixed-race youngster with an absent biological father that Holmes developed a close bond with her mother, together with an independent streak that set her on her way.

The catalyst for her athletic development was a teacher who urged her to join the local running club after winning a few races. Soon she won the national schools 1500m championships, competed internationally and was introduced to her long-term local coach. Around the same time, an enthusiastic Army careers officer ignited her dream of joining the army as a physical training instructor (PTI), which distracted her from the full-time pursuit of her running. Two other life events entered the mix at the age of 17; a first major asthma attack and an emotional crisis when she believed her mother was abandoning her and moved out of the parental home. ‘Independence’ is a word that features strongly in her book.

Barcelona proved a turning point for Holmes, just as it did for the coaches of Gemma and Kayla. Watching the Barcelona Olympics on TV as a 22-year-old, she saw a former junior athletics rival, who she used to beat regularly, competing. Affronted, she was prompted to return to committed athletics training. Soon she progressed to national and international events and showed strong improvements in her PBs. She was back on track; a track that would eventually lead to double gold in Athens, although it took her a decade to get there.

A quest to explain

My initial use of autobiographies to help explain the shape of champions’ paths grew from two to twenty-one over many months of research. I met with the co-author⁸ of Steve Redgrave and Ben Ainslie’s books to check how autobiography writing works – most athletes carefully correct manuscripts so they can be considered authentic. It helped, when refining my choices, to have some criteria to determine which champions’ stories to read. What do the top sportspeople listed in Table 1.1 (see overleaf) have in common?

Steven Gerrard: negotiated rejection by England selectors at U15, early injuries and more recently a transition to playing a deeper anchor role in midfield

My focus has been on the autobiographies of serial champions – who have had sustained success and (apart from Messi, Wiggins, Gerrard and Bolt)⁹ have retired from World Championship or Olympic sport. A focus on serial champions means their stories are long-term accounts of being at the top for a while. This longevity helps when looking back at the influences that shaped their success. Disappointingly, in my autobiography sample there are fewer women’s than men’s, so I made a conscious effort – as in this chapter – to enhance the scope by also including intriguing examples from women’s sport, even though some athletes might not have yet published their stories.

I’ve also found in my search that lessons from other champions’ career-defining achievements, such as Mo Farah (distance running), Chris Froome (Tour de France cycling) and Andy Murray (tennis) help explain a number of points I consider in this book, even though their paths are not yet complete.

There are differences between team sport and individual sporting paths, not least in the subjective nature of team selections, which I have reflected in parts of the book. I am also acutely aware of the tangible differences in group dynamics and group momentum in teams compared to an individual champion competing within, say, an Olympic squad, but my use of autobiographies from rowing, football and rugby help to address this. I sought out other career defining examples from basketball, American football, baseball and cricket to provide further balance.

I also interviewed coaches and experts and consulted the research literature from genetics, physiology and psychology to coaching and sport science. Blending this has been fascinating in trying to answer the big question: what shapes a sporting champion?

There are a number of influences I want to cover in responding to this question. I have used a chronological approach, discussing formative childhood years through difficult transitions to senior level right up to considering specialist issues such as how champions’ redirect their motivational ‘rocket’ in retirement.

By neatly dividing influences and mental aspects into chapters lies a paradox. While aiming to provide clarity and insight with 23 or so neatly segmented chapters I’m also working against my overall argument – that understanding champions’ paths is down to a complex holistic interaction that we are only beginning to understand. I’m mindful of one or two chapters being taken out of context, and American essayist Henry Mencken’s words resonate: ‘for every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong’. So, I’m issuing my own health warning not to take each chapter as a factor in isolation. We don’t exactly know how the 20 or so variables featured interact with each other.

Why do some athletes make it and others do not?¹⁰

In 2012, Dave Collins and his colleague Aine MacNamara published a paper with the provocative title of ‘The Rocky Road to the Top: Why Talent Needs Trauma’¹¹ (note another ‘path’ metaphor!) in which they argued that ‘talented potential can often benefit from, or even need, a variety of challenges to facilitate adult performance’.

They observed that having overcome negative episodes is more common in athletes that reach the top, and also considered that appropriate interventions can enhance an individual’s resilience. The story behind the success of Kayla Harrison and Gemma Gibbons might seem to partly support such a theory.

The negative sporting episodes faced by athletes include the transition from junior to senior competition, changing coaches, relocating, injury and performance dips. These and many others are identified later (see chapter 12). It is how athletes interpret and deal with these challenges along with how they optimise physical (e.g. genetics, conditioning) and mental aspects such as nerves/confidence that shapes their paths.

Final thoughts

You may have noticed even at this early stage of the book that there is one word that is surprisingly underused: ‘talent’. The word and its derivatives are often used carelessly without a passing thought, which is why I use it sparingly. Here is how leading psychologist Dean Simonton from the University of California expressed the use of the word:

Talent has a somewhat strange status within psychology. On the one hand, the concept is commonplace in everyday psychology. Teachers often speak about some of their students having more talents than others, and coaches freely use the term to describe the differential performance of their athletes.¹²

Moreover, conversations among diverse people, including psychologists, will often contain statements like ‘I have no talent for mathematics’ or ‘you have a genuine talent for business’. Talent is frequently counted among the personal capacities responsible for the exceptional performance of a violin virtuoso or Olympic champion or of a ‘maths whizz’.

On the other hand, recent psychological research has increasingly cast doubt on the very existence of talent.¹³Instead of being blessed with innate gifts, the individuals who demonstrate world-class performance in any skill domain are simply those who have engaged in a great deal of deliberate practice.¹⁴

The word is used in many different ways, some implying that talent is a natural gift, a personal inherent capacity someone is born with (i.e. genetics). If you adopt the perspective that practice is the main way of explaining success ‘natural’ talent might be regarded as a myth.

In this book talent refers to an individual’s potential for success. For example, in swimming, the person swimming the fastest in their age group is often considered the most talented. This alone may not indicate potential – beyond this simplistic use of the term other characteristics may contribute, such as anthropometric (e.g. height, weight), motor (e.g. speed, coordination) and psychological (e.g. motivation, stress resilience) aspects. To that we might also add the swimmer’s continued exposure to expert coaching and practices, their social environment (e.g. family) and elements of chance and good fortune.

So while ‘talent’ is used sparingly, two other words are used a great deal. This book often refers to ‘psychological’ and ‘mental’. As Usain Bolt said: ‘mental strength was a tool in every single race, it was as important as a fast start or a powerful drive phase’.¹⁵ This reflects my growing belief that at the absolute pinnacle most athletes operate at similar physical levels and it is how people approach their preparation, performance and indeed their life outside sport that often determine who ultimately steps on to the podium.

My earliest interest in how champions emerge took me for a second time to China. I wanted to know how Chinese sport was preparing for the Beijing Olympics, and was seeking to confirm my beliefs that a wide pool of athletes training together confers an advantage. My beliefs about sporting success have taken rather a leap since then; this chapter explains some of those transformations.

My first visit in 1986 had been as a naive young visiting coach with the newly formed Chinese Olympic windsurfing squad. In my second visit two decades later the sporting landscape had changed with preparations for a home Games in Beijing: the arresting visual images of my trip have stayed with me. It was a bitter, freezing day in January at the Chengdu Sports School. I was wearing about six layers and the moist low cloud, often a feature of Chinese winters, lingered around the colourless buildings.

The facilities and training I saw reinforced my simple mindset at the time: a high population size and large numbers of well coached athletes almost inevitably lead to special individuals who have what it takes to become champions. A sort of numbers game.

This was largely confirmed when I walked into a 50m pool – I’d never seen such a wide pool: it was almost square – and the pool’s width was full of swimmers training. I was staggered by the sheer volume of swimmers in one pool. Their efforts were given a spectral ambience by the mist of chlorine infused condensation rising from the relatively warm water, it was –8°C outside.

From the pool I went into another building and as I climbed the stairs the unmistakable clatter of sponged bat on hollow ball rose to a machine-gun crescendo as we got closer. China dominates world table tennis. But this was table tennis training on a grand scale with lines of tables filling the cavernous hall. A coach shouted loudly and everyone changed their routine from backhand to forehand, some with coaches feeding the shots to the athletes and other pairs whacking the ball to each other. It was astonishing to watch on a number of levels: the speed of play, the young age (under 10) of some of the athletes and the sustained repetition of one shot. We’ll talk about the nature of practice later in the book, but this was a striking illustration of how a motor movement is grooved deep into the brain with repetition – and I’d only glimpsed part of a training session.

Finally, on that memorable first day, I walked into an aircraft hangar of a gymnastics hall. I felt like a visiting ant. The immense space made the hall impossible to heat, but the young athletes went about their different gymnastic elements in the near freezing temperature. Up in one corner of the hall was a countdown clock of some sort. My interpreter revealed that it was displaying the number of days until the quadrennial National Games later that year in Nanjing City. China’s 30 provinces and regions each send a team to compete in Olympic sports and cultural events. Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan province and this sports school would supply many of the athletes for their team. In terms of prestige for athlete and coach, success at the National Games – with 10,000 athletes participating – seals your status at the apex of the Chinese sporting pyramid. From what I’d seen I could only guess at how high the standards must be, as the best athletes from each province constantly pushed one another to ever higher levels. In many sports the standard would be similar to European or World Championships.

Suddenly a heated discussion was taking place between my interpreter and a senior coach. Rather perplexed, I was led to a corner of the hall where the senior coach robustly asked a tall, lithe gymnast to perform her rhythmic gymnastics routine for the overseas guest. It was clear her heart was not in it but she took to the floor nevertheless as the coach fiddled with the small CD player. She was ranked among the top 10 in the world. I’d never viewed this discipline at such close quarters before and the coordination between her movement and the tossing and manipulation of the hoop was breathtaking. I now realised why the hall needed to be so tall – to accommodate the hoop’s looping trajectories. All the while this was done with her performance face – a fixed smile – on despite other body language giving away her dampened enthusiasm.

Pyramid thinking¹

My initial thinking and beliefs stemmed from a popular and often quoted idea that uses the pyramid analogy; in fact in printed sports policy documents it is often presented as a one-dimensional triangle. Elite sport performance and champions are viewed as being at the apex. Their success, according to this way of thinking, is largely predicated on the numbers lower down the pyramid at what is often called the base, or foundation, level. For example, you might hear the leader of a new initiative say something like:

what we’re trying to do here is develop a broad base of participation and attract a diverse range of young people to try the sport: if they like it, we can guide them towards clubs and coaches who can help them take things further.

Then go on to suggest: ‘Who knows, we might attract champions of the future’.

So pyramid thinking follows the logic that if you attract large numbers into a sport and provide appropriate funding, resources and experiences to help athletes – normally youngsters – to develop then you are likely to develop champions. As athletes progress up the pyramid, fewer and fewer are involved and resources are more precisely targeted. In China resources are targeted at sports schools.

Intuitively, it is a simple and appealing theory. When applied as a way of thinking about national sports ‘systems’ it helps explain what I saw in China. A broad base of participation in table tennis or gymnastics, both a strong feature in Chinese schools, refined with the help of funding specialist coaching facilities such as at Chengdu, combined with exposure to top-class competitions. Result: international success.

The collegiate (university) sports system in the United States is likewise largely based on high numbers and fierce competition. Some view it as almost a Darwinian journey towards the top of the pyramid, both in terms of individual athletes’ progress and the survival of the college teams involved – an ESPN sports report was titled: ‘College sports: survival of the fittest.’² This broad collegiate system represents a very strong penultimate layer of their pyramid with numerous young student athletes coached to high levels. It is the reason why the USA will always produce champion athletes in global sports such as basketball, athletics, swimming and women’s soccer, because sporting scholarships provide hubs of top-level athletes.

My initial belief in pyramid thinking started to unravel when I looked more closely at evidence beyond China or US colleges. For instance, in windsurfing the small nations of New Zealand, Greece and Israel dominated the Olympic Games between 1984 and 2004 – countries lacking high numbers of athletes. To investigate pyramid thinking further at a national level is fairly simple. You’d expect countries with larger numbers of players or athletes in a particular sport to broadly speaking be more successful on the world stage. We will consider tennis and rugby union since there is reasonably good data on each sport and they have an international spread (admittedly tennis more so than rugby union).

Tennis professionals

In tennis the number of players in a country who have gained tennis professional ATP/WTA world tour ranking points represents a ‘top slice’ through the pyramid of players near the apex; it could be said to represent the cohort of professional athletes who have committed to chasing their champion’s dream.

In Table 2.1 I compare Spain, USA and Great Britain in terms of total number of players, those with ATP/WTA singles ranking points³ and those close to being champions (i.e. the top 30).⁴ Some interesting comparisons emerge.

An economist might comment on the low efficiency of ‘producing’ champions in Great Britain and USA compared to Spain. In particular, Spain’s conversion of players from those with ranking points to top-30 level is high. National pyramid thinking in tennis is somewhat challenged by this simple research. In this case the numbers game does not add up.

The rugby base

The sport of rugby union is rich in data describing the number of players active at different levels, supplied by each country to the international federation.⁶ Let’s take a look at the base of the pyramid in different counties. We’ll focus on New Zealand, Australia, England and Samoa and their efficiency at the time of writing (see Table 2.2).

If national pyramid thinking is valid in rugby, the highest standards and tallest apex should be represented by the England team. England, with so many teenagers (732,000) and adults (156,000) playing rugby, should dominate world rugby year on year. England has 15 to 30 times as many male teenagers and about four or five times as many men playing the game compared to their Antipodean rivals. New Zealand appears to be the most efficient in producing a top world ranking with a modest player base. Tiny Samoa sometimes comes close to beating the larger countries while drawing on a tiny pool of players.

So there is more to national success in sport than just numbers. Certainly, it helps if you have a lot of people to chose from (i.e. a large ‘talent pool’) but it is what happens on players’ journeys towards the top that shapes national success: things like coaching knowledge, scientific support, sustained motivation, quality practices and appropriate competition opportunities.

Rugby union – in its seven-a-side format – returns to the Olympic Games in 2016, which is encouraging national coaches to examine more closely the transition of players from successful 19/20-year-olds to champion adults. Bizarrely, almost a century ago the United States became the most successful nation in Olympic rugby history, having won the gold medal in both 1920 and 1924. They didn’t have many players then, and the same is true now.